money, soon
first draft of my swedish textbook is almost done, i just need a few more stories and to fix things up a bit in general. tonight i wrote a summary of most of the stuff in swedish grammar and will append it to the back of the book (have yet to write about sentence structure and common prefixes).
i've also started reviewing the 2,000 japanese items i have sitting around on memrise... class starts in 3-4 weeks so i want to ideally have "memorized" all the vocabulary in the textbook for the semester by then.
went on an Ebay shopping spree. bought:
- a vintage japanese straight razor (i have no razor of my own, straight razors save tons of money, vintage ones are built better, and japanese ones seem better than western due to the shape and fact that they're all one single piece of metal). cost about $40, but considering it's in perfectly usable condition and these things normally cost like $200.... also i read all about how to sharpen it without buying further expensive stuff, and i don't use shaving cream, so there should be no further expenses aside from me wanting to see if i can clean up the metal a bit (like the way you polish coins).
- 500g (1lb) of jasmine tea, cost $15. that much lasts maybe half a year, i'm not really sure.
- acupuncture needles (100 with guide tubes; 100 kinda like thumbtacks). read and watched a ton of stuff about it, it can heal your scars amazingly well and fast (there are youtube vids of that), also has drastically improved some people's eyesight (going from only seeing 4% to seeing 20%; increasing field of vision) and i have both those problems so i figured, might as well. cost about $6 total for both together. oh yeah, acupuncture has even fixed a lot of women's fertility problems.
i've been reading first-hand accounts on people's blogs about what acupuncture helped them with, as well as stuff written by acupuncturists, and even an OLD book from back when, in europe, it was only being done in france and by like two guys in england (and france was doing it wrong, like... puncturing organs on purpose). the old book was great and horrific at the same time, they didn't have the chinese needles so they used regular sewing needles, and they ended up curing all sorts of weird stuff. like this one girl had a disease where she was throwing up all the time, nothing had helped her in 2 years...
- a spoonful of live kefir grains, cost about $4. kefir is kind of like rice that makes yoghurt and cheese when placed in milk, the difference is the "rice grains" multiply so you actually get more and more grains as time goes on (and then can sell them or give them away if you want). you can make stuff with any liquid actually (it works with coconut and almond milk, apparently), people are making kombucha with it and like putting it and sugar in water to make soda.
anyway the big deal with this is, it has more good bacteria in it than yoghurt and than anything storebought, and so it's much better for you than those - if you have digestion problems or something it'll especially help. you only have to buy the grains once, and cheese is REALLY expensive to buy so if i can make my own mozarella that'll be great.
so all in all i spent 1-2 week's worth of groceries.... but it's stuff to improve my life and i really hope the kefir will help fix my wife's stomach so i don't regret it. i want to go to an acupuncturist too but i'll wait for that, it's possible my wife's mom will pay for it and otherwise i don't have the money for repeated visits as what i have left has to go to food.